‘Let Me See what I Could Do’: Students' Epistemic Affect when Solving Open-ended, Real-world Problems

This full research paper examines students' epistemic affect, or their feelings about and within the doing of engineering, when encountering ill-defined problems in two of their first engineering science courses. Ill-defined problems are what students will encounter as professional engineers, but engineering students typically get little practice in their coursework at solving these types of problems. As students explained how they worked their way through the ill-defined and open-ended problems, we found evidence of both positive and negative feelings that arose, as well as descriptions of affective transitions, or shifts from one affect to another. Some of these transitions show evidence that students begin to regulate or anticipate these feelings as a result of repeated exposure to ill-defined problems. This work has implications for including the development of epistemic regulation as part of engineering students’ preparation for professional practice.